The City in the Country

Urban migrants and social media use in rural Japan and China

Speakers: Cornelia Reiher (Freie Universität Berlin) in conversation with Elena Meyer-Clement (Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, UCPH).

Funder: HUM:Global.

Organizer: Elena Meyer-Clement, Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies.

Event description

Against the backdrop of ageing populations and the decline of agriculture and local economies in rural areas, governments in many places of the world have sought out programmes to encourage urban dwellers to move to rural areas. This lecture looks at initiatives in Japan and China. Japan has long acknowledged the problems related to shrinking rural populations and economies. The country’s experience with national and local programmes, and the established urban migrant communities in some localities make it a valuable starting point for exploring rural transition through urban-to-rural migration. In China, where rural development had long been characterized by mechanization of agriculture and enormous waves of rural-to-urban migration, urban migrants and corresponding government initiatives are a much more recent phenomenon.

One of the most notable developments in rural transition through urban-to-rural migration is the use of social media. In Japan, authorities often rely on traditional online and offline media to promote localities, but both migrants and rural residents have increasingly turned to social media to present their lifestyles and attract customers. In China, in contrast, governments are much more involved in producing social media presentations, attempting to control the images of “rural life” and of their localities. While this encourages close connections between urban migrants and the government, rural residents are often marginalized in social media representations.  

This lecture is structured as a dialogue between two researchers. Based on online and offline field research between 2018 and 2023, Cornelia Reiher explores how residents of small towns in the island of Kyūshū use social media to negotiate rural and urban lifestyles. She investigates the emerging representations of “rural” and “urban” Japan, and the production of lifestyles and communities that blur the boundaries between urban and rural. Elena Meyer-Clement responds with insights into her research on Chinese Tiktok (Douyin) and in rural communities in Zhejiang Province that turned to social media promotion to attract young urbanites. While highlighting some of the differences between the use of social media in rural transitions in the two counties, the dialogue also delves into the more general question of how social media representations reshape imaginaries and interconnections of the “urban” and the “rural”.